At the risk of telling people things in an age where people don’t like to be told, I wanted to express something that’s been on my heart for some time.
One thing I’ve always been keen to observe is how Christians get along with one another, and how they care for one another, as an extension of the Lord’s final command to “love one another”; just as Jesus loved his disciples, and our love is to be the same as the Father’s love is to Jesus, and Jesus’ love for the Father (see John 13-17).
Just as Jesus loved the disciples is how we’re to love one another.
Jesus himself warned us, that the world will know we are his disciples by the way we love one another. To consistently fail in this regard is to consistently fail God.
And yet, what is the measure of such care?
Care is defined by those who need the care, not by those who are positioned to care, but it is often the case that those who are properly positioned to care, know implicitly how to care. A caricature of the wounded healer, for instance.
The advocate needs no coaching. They discern the sufferer and know how to apply the balm of healing, for they have been there, just as The Advocate has.
Usually, however, the agency to healing is much simpler, and requires much more patience, and needs less of our humanity, than our humanity is comfortable with.
When God is glorified in the healing, the human agent gets no glory, for the human agent who acts for The Advocate seeks no glory; for, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing (Matthew 6:2-4). But still too many want their taste of success and disqualify their love as being an attribute of God’s hand.
The measure of care, defined by those needing it, comes in portions of first aid and then of surgery.
The former requires simply a heart to care, yet the latter requires the discernment of a ‘therapist’ who is trauma-informed.
This denotes that there are two levels of care: the primary level for the actual site of the injury, and the secondary level for the trauma that occurs deeper in the tissues beneath because of the injury.
When we suffer loss or abuse or a crisis of faith or we burn out, there is always the event which is traumatic in and of itself. But then there are the deeper levels in layers of loss and trauma that come as the ripples of suffering flow outward.
Just like a tsunami, the most tumultuous and cataclysmic effects are felt as aftershocks once the waves have reached their destination before receding.
In trauma, the aftershocks last much longer than was ever anticipated, because the story needs to be told and retold, each time producing waves that discombobulate the equilibrium.
It is a sensitive work of faith to continue when there are consistently no signs of progress. But, trust. For healing is like a seed about to germinate. We don’t see growth until the shoot pierces the surface. Then and only then do we celebrate, when our faith is vindicated. Before then it looks like a lost cause.
And there arrives the Christian, with the word of God in their right hand, which compels them to love; and especially, to love the wounded like the Good Samaritan would.
The Christian isn’t the person he slides on by and the other side of the road.
And they are definitely not the person to mete out harm!
And yet in our day, as the #ChurchToo movement suggests, as it continues to gather momentum, we see Christians not only sliding by on the other side of the road, but they were the attackers who left the wounded traveller dying on the side of the road in the first place.
Christian? Really? To not respond in care? To injure? To injure and then to fail to care… oh, that’s right, to injure would preclude the motive of care.
There is little wonder that on the occasion of causing suffering, the one causing suffering fails to respond in care.
It is one thing to cause suffering, it is infinitely worse to fail to respond to suffering one has caused. And yet, the suffering that a person causes is never easily nor willingly confessed. And yet, we will all face God.
Is infinitely better to confess our sin in this mortal life, where healing and reconciliation and God’s will might be done, than to carry it over into a time of judgement.
Yet, those who won’t listen to the calls of the sufferer now are those also who will not heed the call that echoes throughout all eternity. Woe.
Whoever would love God will care for their fellow humanity.
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